


Dancing Among the Shards

by kerlin



Category: Farscape
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-09-03
Updated: 2010-09-03
Packaged: 2017-10-11 10:37:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,148
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/111508
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kerlin/pseuds/kerlin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Avoiding the pieces of a life left behind.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Dancing Among the Shards

"That’s a Christmas tree," he told me, the expanse of his gesture showing me the stately green plant that his family had placed in the corner of the living room.

_"We stopped getting them after my mother died. We were living in Florida then, and a Christmas tree just doesn’t make much sense when it’s seventy-five outside. Anyway, that was the excuse we used, but we all knew it was because Mom wasn’t there anymore, and we just didn’t have the heart."_

"We haven’t put one up in years." He dropped his hands awkwardly to his sides, and then slid them into his jeans. I didn’t see him slide them in; I was watching the tree carefully, resting my eyes on the ornaments and only watching his movements out of the corner of my eye but still aware of every twitch of his shoulders and twist of his lips.

_"When we were little, in preschool, Dad was stationed in Colorado for a while. That was the first time we’d ever seen snow. Livvy and I ran around and tried to catch the snowflakes, to see what they looked like. They always melted before we could really see. Mom helped us make these ornaments out of paper, to look like snowflakes, so that we’d have some that would stay forever. We glooped all sorts of glitter on them, and Mom put them up on the tree every single year."_

There. Glinting in the corner of the light from the electric candle in the window, a faint sparkle of faux metallic glitter. I stepped forward and reached out slightly before I pulled my hand back and realized that this Crichton had no idea why I was reaching for them. Still, I remained mesmerized by the sparkle, the shine - fiery flashes of stars, and I pictured a young John naming each star. Huey, Dewey, Louis…what had he named his center then?

"We made those with my mom." His shoulders were hunched, defensive, and his eyes shadowed. Olivia came up behind him and slid her arm through his, her smile bright and cheery but her stance protective.

"You should have seen him, Aeryn," her voice was cheerful, but not overly so, a well-calculated stress-breaker. She was a Crichton through and through, a peacemaker, a smoother of squabbles. She had the knack for it that her brother had either lost or abandoned somewhere in the spin of the Aurora Chair. "Glue everywhere, and sparkles up and down his face. It took hours to get it all off."

"As I recall, you were covered in it yourself," he retorted, for a brief instant unguarded, older brother to the younger sister.

_"Livvy had glitter all through her hair. It was long and curly even then, and it sparkled whenever she was in light for days and days. She said she looked like a fairy princess, and it took all of Mom’s wiles to get her to sit down for a thorough scrubbing."_

"Hey, I was being a fairy!" Olivia jabbed her finger at his chest and tugged on his arm, pulling his hand out of the pocket of the jeans, and he smiled and let her push him off in the direction of the impromptu buffet table. Jack was pouring eggnog for Chiana, the cream of the drink licked off dark lips by a pink tongue as she giggled and simpered at D’Argo.

"Eggnog, too. Man, I miss eggnog. Thick and rich so it sticks to your lips and you have to lick it off to get all the taste in your mouth - you don’t want to miss a drop."

I watched John sample the eggnog before I realized that Olivia was still standing next to me, obviously waiting for something. I smiled at her, the stretching of my lips strange and almost unnatural, trying to ease the moment the way I had seen John do so many times, with a brilliant smile that somehow solved everything. Except this was me, I didn’t smile, not like that anyway, and this was Olivia, and she wasn’t fooled.

"What’s wrong, Aeryn?" Olivia crossed her arms and I saw John in the tilt of them, in the squaring of the shoulders.

_"You push the world away, Aeryn, Junior Miss Tough Chick of the Universe, you shove and you shove but the harder you push the more you stretch it, and sooner or later it’s going to come zinging back like an elastic and it’s going to hurt when it snaps on your fingers."_

_"It snapped for my mother. She killed him. She killed my father. And she was going to kill me."_

_"You are not your mother. You have a choice. You don’t have to let it snap."_

_"That’s why you’re here."_

_"I’ll never let go, Aeryn."_

"It’s nothing. John was just showing me the Christmas tree," I said, well aware of how foolish it sounded.

Olivia reached out and touched the paper and glitter snowflake, sending it twirling in the faux candle light. She gazed at it for a moment, and then plucked it from the branch. "Here. Take it."

"Oh, Olivia, I couldn’t - " I tried to push the small piece of paper away but she refused to budge, holding it out implacably.

I reached my fingers out to brush against the paper. _Huey, Dewey, Louis and who?_ More firmly, now, I closed my hand around it, taking care not to fold the aging paper. "Thank you."

Maybe she thought I needed the snowflake. Maybe she just thought I needed the gesture of a gift of a piece of John’s childhood, a fragment of the time when he had been so innocent.

I curled my hand around the paper, tested the fragility of its edges and felt the roughness of the glitter even as a small piece broke off and stuck to my finger. I held it up, into the light, and remembered another star, the brightest star in a field of glitter seen through a view port.

Talyn was gone, I realized, and Crais, and Stark. And John. Those monens had engraved themselves upon me, shaped me, and then destroyed me. And here I was, trying to put the last piece of my life back, trying to find love again, and the happiest time of my life was interfering.

New memories, I told myself. New memories that were shared with this John Crichton, a man wholly apart from the hero who had died and left me behind - unworthy as those thoughts might be.

I settled my shoulders and gripped the snowflake as tightly as I dared, brushing my hair back from my face with my other hand. I smiled, not the false, overly bright smile of a few microts ago, but a tentative smile, one that I let grow naturally to suit itself to my face.

"I’d like to try some eggnog, if I may."


End file.
